This is a Guest Post by Nate Beaird.
I sent out a tweet a couple months ago asking people; “What’s the newest, coolest, somewhat useful website you’ve found in the last month or so?” Ryan Brancheau, fellow media director and Twitter friend, told me about this site, Animoto. Have you seen it?
It’s a site that produces photo montages (Picture slide show with music) for you! These montages are generally used in wedding ceremonies and receptions, graduation parties, birthdays, anniversaries, and even funerals. With Animoto, you just upload the photos, select music from their library, or upload a song from your computer and whiz, bam, boom….there ya go! Animoto takes just a few short minutes and makes you a very cool montage!
This is a great resources to anyone interested in using this feature for any of the said events, but also will work great for ministries! Take pictures of that outreach coming up, and make a rad follow-up video to show the church. Get together some pictures of Pastor So-and-So through the last 12 years of his ministry and make a cool “going away” video for him, something he can take and show his family. A new feature they just added is the ability to also add short 3-5 second video clips with the photos too!
You can do a 30 second version for free, which is great for sermon series bumpers. Or for $3, you can make a full length video. You can download it, share it, embed it, post it, and even request a DVD be mailed to you.
And if you thought all of that was really cool… they offer free “pro” accounts for non-profits.
Here’s a sample of how we used Animoto after a huge marriage series at our church. Now wait, I have to confess something. Although you can add text to your videos in Animoto, I downloaded the hi-res version of the video (with my free non-profit “pro” account) and added the text in Final Cut Studio.
Here it is:
Easy as pie.
Ryan Brien says
I've used Animoto several times before and love it! I didn't know they offered pro accounts for non-profits. I'm defiantly going to check that out.
human3rror says
let us know how it goes!
Nate Beaird says
Animoto has saved my bacon on several occasions, on the other hand, I don't want o over-use it… You know, trying to keep the "Ministry Tool Balance" in mind… 😉
Jim says
huh…this is a faster alternative to some other stuff i've been using…and i'm down with free stuff for non-profits
philldo says
Animoto is pretty cool. I used it a few times at "camp" to do the recap videos. Pretty slick for an automagical solution.
Its easy of use essence lends itself not to let you get too nit picky with exact placement of text or photos. For many projects this saves me time because i'm a bit of a perfectionist. Animoto's timing and pacing algorithms are uncanny.
Maybe a future OCD version would be nice for fine tuning a slide show. I experience has been that making small changes results in a totally different video.
Nate Beaird says
Philido, Something you could try…
I've actually downloaded the hi-res version of one video, then sent it through the magical video mixer again. Then I would pick and choose the animations of the pics that I liked….then edited them all together. I'm ADD, we're a different breed. 😉